This invention relates generally to medical waste disposal and more specifically to the sterilization and disposal of contaminated syringes.
Syringes are commonly used in many environments including hospitals, doctors offices, dentists offices, and even at home by diabetics or others who require at-home hypodermic injections. The typical syringe consists of a hollow steel needle threadably coupled to a plastic barrel. A plastic plunger with a rubber gasket is inserted into the barrel for forcing fluids into and out of the plastic barrel and needle. Syringes are used to inject fluids into a body and to remove fluids from a body.
Syringes have always posed health and safety dangers. The sharp needles can stab a person accidentally, even when they are using the utmost care. The contaminated syringes can infect personnel through a needle wound or from spillage of their contaminated contents.
Today, however, the need for safe disposal of syringes is more important than ever. Serious and deadly diseases such as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (A.I.D.S.) and hepatitis can be transmitted by a single needle injury. Often it is not known whether a patient is infected with a serious disease, thus causing fear and concern about all syringes.
The needle portion of a syringe poses two health and safety dangers. First, the needles are sharp and can cause a severe injury. When disposed of, the needles can puncture a waste container or bag and injure unsuspecting personnel. Waste disposal personnel can be injured by needles protruding from plastic garbage bags or from other inadequate waste disposal containers. Even after disposal, sharp needles poses a danger since they have been known to wash up on beaches or turn up in other public places.
Second, needles can pass on diseases, many of them very serious. Many diseases are highly infectious and contagious. A single needle prick from a contaminated needle can infect a person with one of these diseases. Some infectious diseases can be passed to personnel without even a needle prick, mere contact with the needle may be enough. The needles pose a health and safety threat until they have been completely neutralized by sterilization and by disabling the sharp portions.
Syringes pose a health and safety threat even after the needle has been removed. The barrel/plunger portion of the syringe often contains fluids contaminated with infectious diseases. The contaminated fluid in the barrel/plunger portion can leak or spill, thus spreading the disease. This can cause infection of medical personnel, patients, waste disposal personnel and others who come in contact with this waste. After final disposal of the syringe, the contaminated fluids can leak into the ground and contaminate ground water. The barrel/plunger portion of syringes pose a health and safety threat until they have been completely sterilized.
Many devices for disposal of syringes are known. However, they are all lacking in one or more ways.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,003,892 issued to Bricken on Apr. 2, 1991 discloses a process for the sterile disposal of syringes. The Bricken process places used syringes into a container and heats the syringes until the melted plastic encapsulates the needles thus sterilizing and neutralizing the needles at the same time. This process, however, is not practical for disposal of syringes one at a time. It does not prevent spillage of infectious material when syringes are placed into the container nor does it provide for disassembly and sterilization of parts contaminated by such spillage. Finally, it does not provide a means for collecting noxious fumes produced from the process.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,106,594 issued to Held et al. on Apr. 21, 1992 shows an apparatus and method for disintegrating a wide variety of medical wastes and disinfecting them with radio waves. The large scale and complexity of this device restricts its use to large bulk processing of medical wastes. Also, waste products remain in their infectious and dangerous state while waiting for processing.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,900,500 issued to Honeycutt on Feb. 13, 1990 teaches a process of sterilizing and immobilizing potentially infectious devices by means of enveloping them within a hardening polymer that thermally sterilizes the contents by means of an exothermic polymerization reaction. This is essentially bulk processing and requires storage of hazardous waste while enough waste for a batch is accumulated. The process is time consuming, odor causing, and the enclosing polymer will ultimately decompose.
There are numerous other U.S. patents for syringe disposal devices. Most are lacking in one or more respects. Many do not sterilize the infectious waste, others do not disable the sharp needles, still others only process wastes in bulk. Finally, some are complicated, dangerous to use, or give off noxious odors.
Clearly, there exits a need for an improved syringe disposal device which is on-site, simple to use, processes single syringes, provides immediate sterilization, and disables the sharp needles.